A small, straw basket
Full of medals
From good old wars
No one recalls.
I flipped one over
To feel the pin
That once pierced
The hero’s swelling chest.
- Charles Simic (1)
You know, people say they don’t like to talk about war because it brings up bad memories, the nightmares and everything. I don’t believe that. I believe they don’t talk about it because nobody wants to hear it. (Skip Caldwell)
Since I moved away from the South 33 years ago, I have revisited it surreptitiously in novels and movies. The South is captured in every bit of its distinctiveness in the novels of Faulkner and the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. When Walker Percy was asked why there were so many fine Southern writers, he put it bluntly: “Because we got beat!”
The trouble with most movies about the South is that, rather than show us what it’s really like, they simply resort to the same tired clichés, reinforcing the ugliest image of the South introduced by Hollywood in the 60s. Who can forget the rednecks in Easy Rider or Deliverance? Yet nobody wanted to make Southerners the subject of a movie – a movie that wasn’t about plantation and slave owners or about maniacal murderers.
Since he arrived practically on our doorsteps in 1996 with his remarkable film Sling Blade, Arkansas-born Billy Bob Thornton has been struggling against the attempts of celebrity to subdue his talent and turn him into a mere curiosity – a “one-hit wonder.” There was his well publicized failure in 2000 to wrest the film he wanted to make of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses away from Harvey Weinstein who evidently wanted to punish Thornton for refusing to cut Sling Blade. The experience broke Thornton’s heart, according to Matt Damon, and caused him to vow to never direct again.
Looked at from the outside, Thornton’s erratic life has been nothing if not interesting. What keeps us interested in what Thornton is doing, whatever it may be, is the fact that he proved with Sling Blade, as writer, director, and actor, that he was worth watching. To quote Polonius, “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”
Despite his refusal to direct again (as often happens with such “vows” – Thornton has been divorced five times), in 2012 Thornton and Tom Epperson, with whom he has written several scripts since 1992, produced an original script that they called Jayne Mansfield’s Car.
War has cast a very long shadow over the Caldwell family in Morrison, Alabama in 1969. The patriarch, Jim, is a veteran of World War I and, despite his well-adjusted exterior, spends his time listening to police dispatch calls reporting car crashes in his vicinity and driving out to get a look at them, regardless of the time or the weather, before the dead and injured are removed. His three sons, Skip, Carroll, and Jimbo, are all veterans of the Second World War, and the only one of the three who is a functioning adult – Jimbo – saw no combat. Skip had been a fighter pilot before a dogfight with a Japanese plane forced him to bail out rather than burn to death. His upper torso is completely scarred from burns he sustained. Carroll, too, was wounded, and has become an extreme pacifist, taking part in protests against the war in Vietnam to the consternation of his father.
There is a daughter, Donna, who is unhappily married to a good old boy car salesman. Jim’s wife, Naomi, divorced him and ran off to marry an Englishman named Kingsley Bedford. One night during a typically fractious family supper, Jim gets a long distance call from Kingsley’s son, Phillip, announcing that Naomi has died and that because she wanted to be buried “with her people” in Alabama they are bringing her back for her funeral. Naomi’s death and the arrival of Kingsley and his two children, Phillip and Camilla, dredges up memories, good and bad, for the Caldwells.
What is of special interest, on this Veterans Day, is the film’s depiction of the impact of war on three generations of an American family. There is no evidence among these veterans of any pride in their service, even in wars that America was instrumental in winning. Carroll Caldwell has even turned into a hippie, indulging in drug use and marching in protest against the ongoing Vietnam war. His 18-year-old son leaves him speechless at the film’s sad finish when he announces that he has joined the Army.
The film sprawls indolently, which probably explains why it got mostly negative reviews on its belated release in the U.S. in September 2013. (It was premiered in Berlin in February 2012.)(2) The few critics who recommended it noted its performances from heavyweights like Robert Duvall as Jim Caldwell, John Hurt as Kingsley Bedford, and Thornton as Skip, who appears in one scene with all of his service medals pinned directly to his scarred chest. Katharine LaNasa is memorable as Donna, whose horniness is almost palpable. And Frances O’Connor as Camilla Bedford deserves a medal for finding Skip’s brazen advances a turn-on. The scene in which she recites Tennyson naked while Skip “beats off” is just this side of macabre. Tippi Hedren was cast as Naomi Caldwell, but all of her scenes were cut from the finished film. (Unless that’s her blonde hair we see in the open casket in the funeral scene.)
The cinematography, provided by Barry Markowitz, seems diffused with a golden patina – which I found not at all unwelcome. I found the film yet another sentimental journey home, so perhaps I should disqualify myself. Why the film was set in Alabama but shot entirely in Georgia (where I grew up) goes unexplained. And the film’s title is derived from a touring exhibit of what’s purported – in the movie – to be the very car Jayne Mansfield was killed in one night in Louisiana. Jim drags Kingsley to see it, explaining in clinical detail what happened in the accident. Still, the use of it as the movie’s title is a little too Brechtian for me.
(1) That Little Something (New York: Mariner Books, 2009), p. 39.
(2) As of 2018, the film's box office was only $79,178.
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